- Image via Wikipedia
Gene Weingarten wrote a tongue in cheek article for WP about Facebook’s uselessness and the way in which it can become a gigantic time suck, especially for those of us that have other, better things to do. He used a cute, little search engine that piggybacks Feabook’s open graph protocol, http://youropenbook.org and which fills in a much missed feature on Facebook, which is a search tool for status updates. Now, the fun part starts when you try to post on your Facebook wall a link to youropenbook. Each time I tried I got an “abuse” message, namely that the link was flagged as abuse of terms of service. Now, you can try it yourself and see what you get… Let me know what happened.
FROM GENE’S ARTICLE The creators of this site intend it as a cautionary implement, to warn people that the social medium is not adequately protecting their privacy. But in the hands of an objective researcher such as myself, Openbook can be a valuable hermeneutic tool. Through it, one can analyze Facebook anthropologically.
I have done so and am here to make my report.
· When people find it necessary to inform their friends about how unbearably arid and stultifying their lives are — which they do at a rate of roughly 2,000 status updates an hour — the word they choose most often is “boring.” They tend to spell it with extra o’s or r’s, for emphasis. If you check for “boooring” and then keep adding one o, you find at least one hit, until you get to 31 consecutive o’s. When you try “borrrring” and keep adding r’s, you get to 47. Just for the record, the person who, by this metric, suffers the most crippling ennui on the planet, boring with 51 r’s, is Heather S. of Waterloo, Ontario.
· Over the course of 16 days, 130 people alerted their friends to the fact that they “have a pimple.” The location of the blemish is usually specified, as is the size.
Related articles by Zemanta
- How to search through Facebook statuses (holykaw.alltop.com)
- I hate Facebook sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much. . . (Gene Weingarten/Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
- Facebook Officially Launches Page Browser to Help You “Like” Stuff (mashable.com)
- Facebook’s OpenGraph, Three Months Later (readwriteweb.com)
- How SMBs Can Start Using Facebook Places Now (mashable.com)
